Previews

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II -- The Last Stand DLC Exclusive First Look

Spiffy:

Would be a lot of fun with friends; costs the low, low price of free.

Iffy:

Only three playable races might get old; only one arena to play in might bore some players.

Relic's an accomplished developer of real-time strategy games, including Company of Heroes, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, and Homeworld. But one thing these games always lacked is a less intimidating way for people to play multiplayer. More savvy PC multiplayer gamers understand the severe beatings they're likely to receive when they jump headlong into a new online game, but the idea of suffering one brutal defeat after another (all in an effort to have some fun) is enough to turn some folks away from competitive multiplayer forever. Most of these people don't even suspect what's coming; mere moments after finally taking the initiative to click the "multiplayer" button they're "treated" to a completely one-sided battle and berated for not knowing how to play by some 13-year-old kid whose sole purpose in the world seems to be giving "n00bs" a whipping and throwing out slurs about their assumed sexual preference.

Enter the free new downloadable Dawn of War II game mode, The Last Stand. It's completely cooperative, with your opponents controlled by an A.I. who wants one thing: you, dead. Your team consists of three player-controlled heroes -- players can choose from the Space Marine, the Ork, and the Eldar -- whose sole task is to fight against wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemy forces. With little downtime between waves, players have to do their damnedest to keep their multiplier up, so as to ensure a high score and earn experience to level their characters. And to get a higher multiplier players have to control various map points, defeat sequential waves with no casualties, or kill all the enemies in a wave within a preset amount of time.

That probably sounds like a lot, but in practice The Last Stand amounts to killing everything you see. And even if you die or don't hold the control points, your team can up your score simply by surviving. After all, since score and experience are the main reason you're playing, you never really lose, but instead just gain levels and win new pieces of gear to use in subsequent battles. So even in defeat you're rewarded. The result (if you have teammates you get along with) is a desire to jump right back into the fight again and again in order to level your character, equip new items, and get just a little bit further than before.

The leveling process is an important part of Relic's strategy for keeping players engaged. Each level you gain gets you one more item for you to equip on your hero in future battles, allowing you to customize your character's load-out to work best for how you want to play. Early on, for instance, I teamed with a lower-level Ork who used a heavy machine gun to combat enemies from a distance. Later, this same player equipped swords and heavy flamers (flamethrowers to you non-Warhammer people), getting into the enemy's face and crushing skulls right alongside my Space Marine. The ability to equip various items also adds a deeper level of strategy for teams who want to work on their high score, as players can coordinate complementary armaments. In one round I played a character who wielded a suppression weapon, allowing me to slow incoming forces while my teammates ran into the fray and ripped them apart.

The desire to progress would wear thin if you were just fighting increasing numbers of the same enemy over and over, but Relic's more clever than that. While the type of enemy is preset for specific waves -- the second wave will always be X, the third will always be Y -- you don't just fight one enemy type over and over again. Every few waves your team encounters a "boss" wave. Early on you fight a Space Marine hero accompanied by two healers. To make it through this fight your team must separate, drawing the healers away from the hero and killing them one by one. Fighting a predictable order of waves may seem kind of boring, but since the goal is to achieve a high score, Relic doesn't want players to rely on a "lucky draw" to determine how far they get; instead it wants them to strategize with one another about how to fight upcoming waves. In practice, it works -- once I got a sense of how the waves flowed, I quickly found myself placing my character at key points in the arena for bosses, or sticking close to assist teammates when I knew a particularly difficult fight was coming.

The Last Stand won't radically reshape the online sphere of Dawn of War II, but it has the potential to bring in a different kind of multiplayer audience, and it offers competitive gamers a new way to play with friends. Hardcore nerds like me will have to overlook their prejudices against mixing once-sworn enemies with allies (especially if Relic releases other playable races like Tyranids, Chaos Space Marines, etc.). And yeah, players will likely still have to face the wrath of the occasional online elitist who hates everyone for not playing up to their standards. But I can definitely see myself occasionally popping into this mode when I need a break from everything else. And hell, even if you're not sure The Last Stand is something you're interested in, you might as well download it, as it doesn't get much cheaper than free.